Defenseless

by Celeste Marsella

  “Leave your things here and follow me. Dean Carlyle will meet you in the conference room upstairs for the senior administrative staff meeting.”

  “Senior staff meeting?” I said. “Already?”

  “Ja, mein Fräulein,” she said, nodding. “Every Monday morning the assistant deans report to Dean Carlyle on what has been happening in their respective departments. Issues are discussed and problems are resolved.” She motioned for me to follow her and drew me close to her side as she whispered, “But it is only Dean Carlyle that you need to hear. Come now.”

  Rita arched dark eyebrows as she walked out of my office toward a spiral staircase. As we ascended together I gazed upward at an immense crystal chandelier suspended from the ceiling. After passing several offices, one of which I recognized as Carlyle’s, we arrived at the walnut door of an attached conference room.

  Rita pulled it open, patted me on the back, and gently pushed me in.

  “Marianna, welcome aboard!”

  The dean was standing just inside the entrance. The room was so brightly lit I squinted and then frowned and then smiled. And then squinted again. Behind Carlyle was a peanut gallery of grinning, eager faces.

  “How are things going so far? Are you finding your way around?” Without waiting for an answer, he turned on his heels. “This is our senior management team.”

  The room’s gorgeously polished, rectangular mahogany table looked like a bigger, taller version of the table dominating Carlyle’s office. Arrayed precisely down this table’s center were three crystal pitchers of ice water. Each seating position featured a clean legal pad, a newly sharpened pencil, and a matching crystal water goblet resting upside down on its own linen cocktail napkin. I was moving on up in the world. The dean looked around the room before giving an eyebrow-nod to a woman standing alone by one of the windows. This stocky five-foot blonde with a short bob, who had no qualms about giving me a quick but intense once-over, now swung her arms wide and took several long manly strides toward us. She was built low to the ground, as my father would say—her legs were unusually short for her body.

  “Assistant Dean of Operations,” Carlyle crisply declared as she stood before us.

  “Byron Eckert, Reese House, 1998,” she said dryly.

  “Long name,” I quipped. But still no smile, not even the hint of one. From either one of them.

  “Byron was All-Conference in women’s soccer,” he said. “Weren’t you, Byron?”

  I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d patted her on the shoulders at this point and mussed her hair a little, like a proud father. But he didn’t. He simply stood by, hands at his side, in perfect military control.

  “Yes, sir,” Byron answered.

  “Byron oversees financial operations. She’s the money person. Sort of our COO.” Carlyle made serial eye contact around the room, shaking his head. “Finances are an unfortunate but essential fact of life. Isn’t that right, Byron?”

  “It’s how we survive,” she said flatly, looking straight at me. She opened her mouth as if readying to say more, but Carlyle was already moving on to his next introduction. One by one the rest of his handpicked staff presented themselves to me with not a vowel-suffixed surname in the bunch.

  “Mitsy,” Carlyle called out to an older, taller woman whom Byron had been chatting up when I entered. This slender salt-and-pepper brunette had remained near the window, listening intently and smiling cautiously. “Come meet Marianna Melone.”

  The woman wore an elegant tweed suit and low-heeled shoes. Carlyle began speaking of her as if she weren’t present. “Dr. Mitsy Becker is a registered nurse with a Ph.D. in psychology. She’s our Assistant Dean of Student Health Services. You two may want to get to know each other better when you have some time. After all, sometimes all a student needs is a little talking to. I hate to call it counseling, but I don’t think Mitsy would approve of an alternative characterization of her function here. Would you, Mitsy?”

  “That would be my word, yes.”

  Mitsy extended her hand. Her smile reached out to me and seemed genuine, and there was a stylish and comfortable something in her eyes, as if she were unafraid to let me focus in on them, plumb their depths.

  “I’m happy to meet you,” I said, shaking her hand.

  She served me a second helping of her beaming smile, and I thought she might be the only one of this crew who would share her knowledge with me. Then she took her seat at the long table and waited out the elaborate verbal and physical curtsies of the remaining introductions, watching me all the while with a look not only of humane solicitousness, it seemed, but, just maybe, motherly concern.

  “Tripp, come on over and meet Marianna,” Carlyle barked, this time to a young man seated by himself at the table.

  A feature of the dean’s welcoming ritual seemed to be that no one stepped forward until summoned by name.

  Tripp hoisted himself up and sauntered over. About thirty years of age he seemed like a young Carlyle clone, a preppy of the absolutely intolerable variety. Boy’s standard haircut, flannel shirt, polished wingtips, the works. Plus the whole supercilious attitude, to a damning and stereotypical T. If the boss hadn’t been present, and if Shannon or Laurie had been around to cheer me on, I’d be having myself a field day chewing this Tripp up and spitting him out. Hiya, Tripp. Did I get that right? Tripp, is it? Cool name. Family name or was it shortened? I had a first cousin, Chip, named after his father, Jock. As in “chip off the old Jock.” Poor Chippy’s dead now, though. Terrible shooting accident with my gay uncle, Doogie.

  Tripp shoved his hand at me. “Tripp Hoven, Angus, 1996. Admissions. Pleasure!” he chirped. His immaculately manicured fingers slipped in and out of my hand like silk.

  Carlyle rocked back and forth on his heels, watching the pair of us as if we were dogs he’d just crated together. Would we get along? Who would assume the dominant position? As long as no one peed on me I’d let them drink from my bowl. My determination to do my job and appear a team player outweighed my instinctive reaction to mock Tripp’s horn-rimmed glasses that screamed genteel and old school so loudly I verged on asking him whether the whole getup was a joke. But none of it was a joke. It was so the opposite of a joke. I’d learned at least that much from my old friend Jeff Kendall.

  “Tripp here’s in charge of new applications and the admissions process overall. You, Marianna, get into gear after that. Ideally, Tripp does his job so well that you have nothing to do.”

  Carlyle focused on another young man who, lolling in a chair, had looked to be scrutinizing Tripp’s introduction as if we were bugs on a slide. I had never met such intense people. “Chad? Come on over, please.”

  Carlyle turned to me. “Chad Fletcher is the Assistant Dean of Career Services. Pretty self-explanatory, yes?” He looked at me, then at Chad. “Chad networks our students with other alums.” The elegantly dry dean suddenly smiled, alerting us to the pending utterance of some elegantly dried-up witticism. “Sort of like a fancy employment service for family members only. Right, Chad?”

  “That’s what we like to accomplish whenever possible,” he said.

  “All right, then,” Carlyle said, clapping his hands once. “Let’s get started, folks.”

  The dean made a body count as the group settled into their seats. Abruptly his face turned lime-sour. “Tripp, what time do you have?”

  “My watch reads 9:05. But it could be fast, sir.”

  “Chad,” he said. “How about you?”

  “Me? Oh, yes sir, I have five past nine too, sir. Yes. Oops, 9:06 now.” Even as Chad curved his mealy mouth into a half smile he remained oddly wide-eyed. Chad seemed to be one of those people who literally couldn’t give you the right time of day without a dress rehearsal in full costume. Everything by the script.

  Suddenly, in a breathtaking burst of aggression, Byron yanked her chair out from the table so forcefully it clattered against the edge, riveting everyone’s attention, if not waking the dead. “It’s almost ten past nine
, sir. He’s late.” She plopped into her seat angrily.

  “Well. Let’s get started then.”

  At last, down Carlyle sat, the rest of the groupies dropping to their own chairs like gassed flies. The dean turned to his pigeon-toed executive assistant, seated primly and quietly to his left. “Make a note, Joan, it’s ten past nine and McCoy’s not here.”

  Suddenly, as though on cue, both conference doors exploded open.

  There, on the threshold, framed by the misty Montana light of my imagination, stood a man very close to six feet in height, clad in a suit that looked a week overdue for dry cleaning. Everything in his expression feigned seriousness except the stereo twinkle in a pair of deep blue eyes.

  He straddled the double doorway, both his hands still cupping the brass knobs. “Sorry, boss,” he said. “Battery’s dead on my Timex.”

  “Sit down, Mike.” Carlyle still hadn’t looked at him.

  He collared a seat from a corner of the room and eased it in next to mine. “Be still my heart,” he whispered, winking at me.

  In closer proximity his aftershave was a mix of citrus and musk. The stone in his pinky ring was emerald green.

  “All right, then,” Carlyle pronounced. “Now that everyone is here we can begin.”

  The dean’s opening oration was about the nine-hundred-pound gorilla in the room, or, more precisely, the body on the morgue slab.

  “Melinda Hastings—a recapitulation for our new member. Most of you are aware of the press release I issued the morning after she . . . her body was discovered. Holton publicly expressed our condolences to the family regarding the unfortunate incident, etc., etc. Holton’s official position, and as far as I know the still current position of law enforcement authorities”—Carlyle looked at me either for verification or as a dare to contradict him—“is that she was murdered by some local thug with no connection to this school. I don’t think I’m being coarse if I propose that we continue to move beyond that tragedy. Her family wants nothing more than to put it behind them, and I agree with them. For Melinda’s sake and for the sake of this institution, I think we should respect the Hastingses’ mourning process and let the state do its work.”

  Why did I get the feeling he was talking directly to me?

  He waited barely a minute before he not only moved on but sped away from the Hastings murder (much like the “thug” who’d dumped her body in the middle of downtown Providence). I decided to keep my mouth shut (and keep my day-old job) by not mentioning that pesky little evidentiary item of the Holton blanket in which Melinda was coddled when she was dropped from the local Providence thug’s car.

  After a few seconds of satisfactory silence, Carlyle gazed off into the far horizon. Then suddenly he shifted into high gear and dug into the business at hand. He was like the coach of the favored team, telling us that as proven winners we had to keep the students’ spirits lifted and their aspirations high, murder notwithstanding. For about twenty minutes he pep-talked us.

  “As you know, each year we are absolutely inundated with applications. Tripp, how many did we have to select from last spring?” All eyeballs transited Trippward. Tripp eagerly cleared his throat.

  “Around twenty thousand applications for five hundred spots, sir. That translates into forty applicants per opening.”

  “All right, then.”

  Many more numbers, ratios, and equations followed, the attending staff taking close note. Everyone except McCoy. Cryptic phrases like “added value” and “bandwidth” took swift and awesome flight across the room. I had been a practicing lawyer for five years but was still mightily impressed by everyone’s smooth articulation. Words were pronounced slowly and deliberately. Each humble syllable, lowly consonant, and meek vowel was sounded out for all it was worth. Damn. This was worlds away from what I was used to, either as a prosecutor or as a girl from the Hill where “cheese pizza and two small Cokes” was about as heady as the conversations got, and where most sentences were shot out at point-blank range, articles severed here and verbs blown away there, and all the gaping holes plugged by obscenities—

  “To cut to the chase,” Carlyle went on, “we are this year once again engaged in a very selective and competitive process . . .”

  Of course, Carlyle had made this speech a half million times, not only to his administrative staff but to financial donors and anyone else who would listen—including the students. Still, the people arrayed around me were all mesmerized smiles and audible gasps, as if the pap he was spewing were iambs from a recently unearthed folio of Shakespeare. Like actors in some perennial theatrical run, they’d continue to feign awe at this monologue over and over again until Same Time Next Year.

  Prompted by Carlyle, Chad now harangued us with the details of Holton’s sterling record in postgraduate job and academic placements. As if Carlyle and everyone else didn’t already know the numbers.

  Byron, while verbally mute, watched the goings-on with kinetic intensity. Her eyes darted from face to face, and she gnawed at her bottom lip like a reformed chain-smoker who was too well bred to chew gum in public.

  Interestingly, Mitsy wasn’t queried for information, nor did she volunteer any. Did Carlyle maintain some special reservoir of respect for her? Or was it simply that in age she was Carlyle’s peer?

  McCoy too said nothing, never picked up a pencil, and was never questioned. Thirty minutes into the second hour, the Hulk yawned, stretching backward in his seat as far as he could without flipping.

  Just as Carlyle’s words ebbed to a close, McCoy bolted upright in his seat.

  Carlyle noisily slid his chair back as if readying to stand. No one else budged. Carlyle tilted his head back and sharply caught his breath, as if he’d spied a tarantula on the ceiling.

  “Mike,” he said to McCoy without looking at him. “The cafeteria matter. Are you on top of that?”

  “Yup.”

  Carlyle swallowed, rather loudly. “Could you elaborate?”

  “Rita has the report. The facts are all there. I don’t do the wrist-slapping.”

  There was a teensy-weensy narrowing of Carlyle’s eyes. “Your brevity never ceases to amaze me, Mike.”

  Carlyle’s eyes shifted ominously to me.

  “I especially invited Mr. McCoy to attend our staff meeting this morning.”

  Carlyle looked McCoy head-on for the first time.

  “Thank you for interrupting your busy day, Mike. I’ve scheduled a one-on-one meeting today between you and Miss Melone here.” To me, Carlyle said, “Marianna, this is our Chief of Security, Mike McCoy.” Then back to McCoy, “Marianna is our new Assistant Dean of Student Ethics. Faculty lounge at eleven-thirty, Mike. Give Marianna an overview but make it thorough. She needs to get a quick read on all our open matters.” He dropped his chin. “Among other things there’s the Cummings problem. We need it dealt with prudently but tactfully. It’s volatile.”

  Turning his attention to me, Dean Carlyle went on. “Mike gets most of the initial complaints. It’s you he’ll pass them on to for processing.”

  I looked at McCoy for polite corroboration. He gave it to me—with a wink.

  McCoy’s clumsy audacity certainly took me aback, and yet the others in the room were unmoved. My mouth dropped.

  Thing is, there are glances and there are winks. And there are simple winks and suggestive winks—like the one McCoy gave me. Criminal ventures. When men wink at me that way, my autonomic response is to punch them in the offending eye. I now resisted this urge, though just barely. Actually I was getting the distinct impression not a soul present would have minded if I’d laid the fool flat out on the conference room floor.

  Carlyle began to wrap things up. “Please be prepared to present your departmental updates to the group next week. Same time, same place. And I remind you all again, the Hastings matter is to be broached tactfully, if at all, and never with any non-Holton affiliates.”

  The dean paused and then looked in my direction. Given that no one could rise from the t
able until cued by Carlyle, the staff watched him like hawks. The fan in the heating system kicked on and in that instant I became acutely aware again of how unnaturally bright the conference room and its occupants were; the glare of freshly buffed lemon oil on impervious oak. The AG’s office now came to mind as counterpoint. Our weekly case updates: dim lights filtering through heavy cigarette smoke . . . rancid alcohol on the breaths of attorneys, perps, and cops alike at the nine a.m. court arraignments . . . bodies slumped wearily in folding chairs of hard dirt-hued plastic . . .

  At last Carlyle stood. “Once again, my admonition: Out of respect for the family, mum on the Hastings matter,” he declared.

  Pencils hit the table as if the dean had pronounced “Time’s up” at the end of an exam.

  Carlyle flapped his fingers in the air in that odd, distrait way of his and then glided swiftly out, a politician making his exit, shooing away questions. With the exception of McCoy, his sycophantic fan club popped up from their seats and followed their master out the conference room door. Only Byron was still in her chair, staring at us and still sharpening her teeth on that bottom lip. Her attitude suggested either instant freeze-dried resentment of me or an understandably long-smoldering antipathy toward McCoy. Frankly, it puzzled me that someone as apparently unpolished as this McCoy was at a place like Holton. Unlike me he wasn’t even trying to fake gentility. Really the bloke seemed too secure to even give a fig. But that didn’t explain how McCoy got hired in the first place. Maybe the same way I did: Carlyle thought he was bendable or at least a little bent.

  “What time do you have?” McCoy asked me.